Entities often generate and use data that is important in some way to their operations. This data can include, for example, business data, financial data, and personnel data. If this data were lost or compromised, the entity may realize significant adverse financial and other consequences. Accordingly, many entities have chosen to back up some or all of their data so that in the event of a natural disaster, unauthorized access, or other events, the entity can recover any data that was compromised or lost, and then restore that data to one or more locations, machines, and/or environments.
While data backup is a valuable and important function, the ever increasing volume of data that is generated presents significant problems. In particular, many companies today find their backup and recovery process strained as data growth in enterprise IT environment continues to accelerate at exponential rates, while data-protection solutions have struggled to keep pace.
Some of the problems that are experienced in such environments concern the use of virtual tape systems for storage. For example, virtual tape data generated by an enterprise is typically stored locally at the enterprise on some type of storage device, or storage devices. However, it is often the case that this virtual tape data is accessed only rarely, if ever. Moreover, the local storage may be relatively expensive in terms of its capital costs and maintenance costs. Thus, a poor value proposition is presented insofar as an enterprise may find itself paying relatively significant costs to store data that may rarely, if ever, be accessed.
In light of problems and shortcomings such as those noted above, it would be useful to be able to move virtual tapes from primary storage to secondary storage, based on policies defined by a user. It would also be useful to implement policies in such a way that movement of the virtual tapes would occur automatically. Finally, it would be useful to be able to implement a policy that provides that a virtual tape will be moved from one storage to another storage after a defined period of non-use of the data of that virtual tape.